Karl Subban: The General of Jane-Finch

Brookview Middle School sprawls just off Jane Street north of Finch Avenue in one of Toronto’s toughest and poorest neighbourhoods. Trash — including, one morning this week, a case of empty Corona bottles — litters the parking lot.

But at the school door, the strife of Jane-Finch gives way to military order. Every morning, students wait in lines outside: Grade 6s at one entrance, Grade 7s at another and Grade 8s at a third. Each teacher fetches their students and leads them to the gym through hallways that are spit-polished clean.

Wearing blue and white uniforms they stand in rows, holding textbooks and binders for their first class. On stage, the principal resembles a general surveying his army.

“Teachers, look down your line, please,” commands Karl Subban. His booming voice — half Southern Baptist preacher, half drill sergeant — needs no microphone. “All week we’ve been working on listening and looking,” he says. He adds, later: “If I teach you to be determined, you are going to succeed in life.”

Mr. Subban’s surname may be familiar. He is father to Pernell Karl Subban, or P.K. for short, who helped Canada win two world junior hockey gold medals, joined the full-time roster of the Montreal Canadiens last year and became the first rookie defenceman on the famed squad to score a hat trick. He is also outspoken, a trait he inherited, in part, from the old man. But P.K. is only the most famous of the principal’s talented offspring. Two other sons, Malcolm and Jordan, play with the Belleville Bulls of the Ontario Hockey League, and his daughters, Nastassia and Natasha, are teachers. In short, Karl Subban and his wife Marie, a banker with CIBC Mellon, have done plenty right.

Karl Subban is a kind of outsider to this tough neighbourhood on Toronto’s northwest fringe. When he was 11, his parents immigrated from Jamaica to Sudbury. Karl, one of four brothers, learned hockey on outdoor rinks, playing goalie in a French neighbourhood where everyone cheered for the Montreal Canadiens.

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“I was No. 29, Ken Dryden in net,” Mr. Subban recalls. Later he moved to Toronto, married and began teaching elementary school.

Five years ago, while working at Humber Summit Middle School in a less fraught neighbourhood, he asked the district school board to transfer him here, to what he calls his biggest challenge yet: making a difference at Jane and Finch, where the city appears to be its most segregated. Brookview counts 20 caucasians among 520 students. About half are black; the rest are of Asian or South Asian descent.

Uniquely, most staff here reflect the community, led by Mr. Subban and vice-principals Belinda Longe and Kwame Lennon: three self-confident, passionate administrators.

Mr. Subban’s arrival came in 2006, just months after Jordan Manners graduated from Brookview; a year later he was shot dead, in Grade 9, inside nearby C.W. Jefferys Collegiate.

“We’ve lost too many kids, either dead, or in jail or they’re dropped out of school,” the principal says.

“We don’t want to be the pipeline to the unemployment office.”

And so Mr. Subban brought regimentation, slogans and the pursuit of self-respect to Brookview. Once chaotic and dirty, the school is now clean and quiet.

His bigger challenge is academic. In the Hollywood version of this story, results climb steadily and students move on to study calculus at Harvard; in real life, Brookview’s scores on standardized provincial tests have fluctuated. Last year, just 40% of Grade 6 students here reached the provincial average. To push that to 60%, Mr. Subban coined a new slogan: “The Drive for 60.”

Wednesday morning’s assembly has both good news — the girls’ basketball team won its quarter-final game — and bad: “There will be no snack today.”

The school relies on funds from the Toronto Foundation for Student Success to distribute carrots, celery, apples, oranges, bananas and, when funds permit, cheese, melba toast and whole wheat bagels. Funds have petered out; last week the school slashed the snack from daily to twice a week.

After the assembly, Darlene Jones’s Grade 6 students follow her to English class, where Kaytisha Mayers, student of the week, leads them in the Brookview Pledge:

“I come to school to save my life,” she says. The class repeats the words. “By working hard to be a better person and a better student. Time. Task. Training. Team. Practise makes us better.” She raises her fist and adds a cheer: “Woo!”

“This is an initiative of Mr. Subban,” the teacher explains. “We call it, ‘SLICE.’ ” S, the students tell me, is for “standing;” L, “looking and listening;” I is “I message;” C is “complete the task.” A boy struggles to define the E. “Expl…”, he starts. “Exar..” He finally spits it out: “exemplary.”

The morning meeting, the pledge, the lessons given standing up — such innovations might have suffered pushback elsewhere from unionized teachers.

“Karl has the buy-in,” says Mr. Lennon, who himself grew up in social housing in Toronto. “Because of Karl’s great relationshp with the team, there hasn’t been too much resistence to the system.”

The Toronto District School Board has invested some money into this and other challenged schools; on Tuesday, Cathy Pollock, a TDSB “model schools for inner city teaching/learning coach,” spent the day with Grade 6 teachers. York University students tutor here too.

After school I stay with Ghasem Ahmadzadeh and six Grade 6 students getting extra lessons, funded through the Ontario Focused Intervention Partnership.

Bonus: they have snacks. One boy tears pieces off Dempster’s whole wheat bread and dips them in strawberry jam. There is no butter knife.

The chance to focus on academics at all is a treat for Brookview teachers; Ms. Jones credits Mr. Subban.

“Karl is outstanding,” she adds. “He talks to every one of the students like they were his own son or daughter. The students need a father figure, they are craving it, and they get it. He helped tear down negative perceptions of the school. And now we are always in the news in a positive light.”

Outside, Mr. Subban roams the hall. He carries a black cow bell, inscribed with the logo of the Belleville Bulls, home team of his two younger sons.

“I bought a bunch of these,” he says. Mr. Subban believes that Brookview’s students can thrive as his children have: overcoming challenges through hard work. He recalls struggling to pay for hockey.

“P.K., Malcolm and Jordan have the same hockey pants in their pictures,” he laughs. “We passed them down. I remember buying P.K.’s second-hand skates at Duke’s. There’s a thing called ‘delayed gratification.’ And P.K. used to break sticks like crazy. We made sacrifices. No vacations. Our kids are not great kids but, you know what? They’re working hard.”

After lunch, two girls brawl near the Grade 8 entrance. A staffer leads an enraged 13-year-old into a staff room.

“All right,” says Mr. Subban. “I’m going to go to my office now and drink my Jamaican coffee. When you calm down we can talk.”

Mr. Subban speaks to both girls’ parents; he hangs up, looking sad. “The parents of the one girl said they won’t call police if the mother of the other girl agrees to meet them,” he says. “But the other girl’s mother said she won’t meet anyone. She’s through. So now the other girl’s parents are calling police. Their daughter was assaulted. What are they going to do?”

Mr. Lennon pokes his head in. “The boys in blue are here,” he says. “Tell them we are suspending her until Christmas,” says Mr. Subban.

The principal changes the subject — back to hockey. He unlocks a nearby storage room, which overflows with skates, hockey pants, shoulder pads, shin pads: enough equipment to outfit four hockey teams. These are donations to Hockey Heroes; with corporate sponsors, 30 students from Brookview skate with Hockey Heroes every week on ice at York University.

“Hockey is out of reach of these people,” he says. “They see it as something foreign. We have young people who are struggling and we are not going to give up on them.”